Antony Gormley OPEN HOLD, 2017

This sculpture is part of Antony Gormley’s OPEN BLOCKWORKS series of works, which he realised between 2014 and 2018. ‘I wanted to open the body up,’ explains the artist. ‘I had been using absolute masses that are solid and confront you with your own bodily spatial displacement, but another way is to make intersecting cells out of planes that are enclosures but are open enough to invite a speleology of the eye.’ Viewers are invited to walk around the sculpture, gradually reconstructing the mass of the body lying before them by mentally assembling the solid facets of its building blocks, or watching it disintegrate when they approach it from the other side. In the interplay between absence and presence, void and substance, Gormley invites a reflection on human interaction, which he likens to entering a room full of strangers and moving from one to the other.